Report from 2023 NSS / MIC / RTSD

Vancouver, British Columbia

The 2023 NSS/MIC/RTSD conference was held in Vancouver, BC, Canada, at the beautiful Vancouver Convention Centre, Nov. 3^rd to 11^th; the meeting was held in hybrid mode to facilitate attendance for those who still wanted to participate but could not travel for some reason.  The plenary sessions were made openly available through live-streaming as a token of appreciation for our scientific community at large. The conference was well attended with contributions from 41 countries, a record number! Four hundred fifty abstracts were submitted for NSS, 565 for MIC and 87 for RTSD. A new feature this year was publication of submitted abstracts in IEEE Xplore to serve as the Conference Record (published in December); this ensured a timely publication of the conference content, while also minimizing concerns over the 30% content overlap rule when publishing in peer-reviewed IEEE journals. The plan for next year is to have the abstracts published even earlier, shortly before the start of the conference. 

Welcome

Both NSS and MIC opened with welcome greetings from the General Chair, Vesna Sossi, who also provided a brief description of the broader IEEE and NPSS activities. The NSS chairs, John Valentine and Audrey Corbeil-Therrien continued the opening of the NSS, which featured three excellent plenary speakers, Jae Sung Lee (Revolutionizing Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging: The Advancements and Promise of Radiation Detectors and Artificial Intelligence Technology), Sabrina Nagel (Fusion ignition in the laboratory and the role of diagnostics at the National Ignition Facility) and Katherine Pachal (Searching for Dark Photons at TRIUMF: Leveraging Canadian facilities to advance fundamental science). 

Monday — Awards and Recognitions

A plenary session on Monday was dedicated to Awards: 

• The RITC Early Career Award —Gerard Ariño Estrada
• The RITC Emilio Gatti Technical Achievement Award — Gian-Franco Dalla Betta
• The RITC Glenn Knoll RISC Outstanding Achievement Award — Anatoly Rozenfeld,
• The IEEE Glenn F. Knoll Graduate Award — Vanessa Nadig. 

Stefan Ritt’s leadership in technical achievements and service to the NPSS society were recognized with the NPSS Richard Shea Distinguished Member Award for ‘his innovative leadership as the President of the NPSS and an organizer and instructor at NPSS Summer Schools and as a world-leading expert in the field of ultra-fast data acquisition.

This year also marked the 15^th anniversary of the initiation of the Valentin Jordanov Travel grants; Valentin was gratefully recognized by our community and by past and present recipients, who provided inspiring snippets on the impact of the grant on their careers.

Monday concluded with the NSS dinner, held in the Vancouver Science World, where attendees delighted in playing with the scientific exhibits.

RTSD also opened on Monday, with Ralph James and Michael Fiederle as chairs and Paul Selin as the invited plenary speaker (Perovskites – a broad field of radiation detector technologies). The RTSD lunch was held at the Pinnacle Hotel Harbourfront, breaking with the long-standing cruise tradition.

Tuesday — Joint Sessions

A new initiative this year was a special session on Future Directions: Megatrends, Roadmaps and Standards.

• Three invited speakers from our communities Zhong He (University of Michigan – RTSD), Gabriella Carini (Brookhaven National Laboratory – NSS) and Simon Cherry (UC Davis – MIC) presented their views on present and anticipated technical innovations within our collective areas of expertise that have the potential for a disruptive impact on pressing societal needs
• Two leaders from the IEEE Future Direction committee John Verboncoeur  (Michigan State University) and IEEE Technical Activity Board VP Rakesh Kumar (Technology Connexions, Inc) then presented their views on how such visions could be captured into Roadmaps that would lead from technical ideas to tangible products

This was an eye-opening time which is catalyzing a Roadmap design effort in our community.

Wednesday — MIC Opens

Wednesday saw the opening of the MIC part of the meeting. The MIC chairs Margaret Daube-Witherspoon and Rutao Yao hosted the plenary sessions which included very interesting plenary talks and presentation of awards: speakers were Anca Constantin (High-resolution astronomical imaging: drivers for development, technological advances, and pitfalls) and François Bénard (Working with chemists and physicists to optimize radiopharmaceutical therapy in oncology).

Congratulations go to Ge Wang, recipient of The Edward J. Hoffman Medical Imaging Scientist Award, Han Gyu Kang, recipient of both the EJ Hoffman Early Career Development Grant and the Bruce Hasegawa Young Investigator Medical Imaging Science Award, and Thomas Koehler, recipient of The IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society Medical Imaging Technical Achievement Award. We were delighted to be able to give 163 student grants to facilitate attendance for this very important segment of our community. The MIC dinner was held in the Vancouver Aquarium – and good times were had by all.

A Vibrant and Engaging Conference

The meeting was supported by a record number of 69 exhibitors and sponsors and was complemented by eight short courses and four workshops, a good fraction focused on what the community deems forward-looking ‘hot topics.’ The Women in Engineering (WIE) and the Young Professional (YP) events were vibrant with strong audience participation; Deva Sobel gave a mesmerizing talk at the WIE event (Lessons from Mme. Curie for Women Engineers), while  the YP event featured discussions between the young participants and senior members from Academia and Industry.

Overall the meeting was scientifically and socially very vibrant – the excitement of having in-person interactions was tangible; existing collaborations were strengthened and new ones were formed. And thank you to all the attendees and the many volunteers that made this meeting such a success!

Vesna Sossi, General Chair of the 2023 NSS MIC RTSD conference can be reached by E-mail at [email protected]

NPSS MIC Experience — A Student’s Perspective

My name is Logan and I am in my fourth year of undergraduate physics at the University of Edinburgh. I am spending this year in Vancouver taking part in a research project in TRIUMF’s Life Sciences Division so I had the opportunity to volunteer at the 2023 NSS/MIC/RTSD together with a handful of other students from my research group. In return for assisting at the registration desk, sitting in on the short courses, and helping out in general, we were given full access to the conference; this was a very unique experience for undergraduate students.

As part of my duties, I sat in on the Basics of Radiation Detection short course, which I found to be accessible, interesting, and relevant to my project at TRIUMF. In my education so far, I have not had the opportunity to take classes on radiation detectors, so all my knowledge has been acquired through work experience.  It was thus great to take a course to fill in the gaps and give me a more solid foundation for when I return to Edinburgh.

I spent a lot of time at the various poster sessions, but mainly concentrated on the MIC ones as they were most closely related to my research. Medical physics is still new to me so it was very interesting to be able to browse the posters to see the wide range of research being done in the field. It was especially satisfying when I could fully understand the content of a poster as it showed me how much I have learned since starting at TRIUMF.

One of the best things about my time at the conference was having the opportunity to meet researchers and to ask them about their work. Before the meeting started, I was a little worried that I would be looked down upon due to being an undergraduate student. Thankfully my worries were completely unfounded  as everybody I interacted with was really friendly and seemed to have an interest in engaging young people like myself with their areas of research. 

The conference organisers were a pleasure to work with, they shared a similar sentiment to the researchers  and were keen for us student helpers to get the most out of the week. They also made sure we never went hungry during our days at the conference.  I would gladly volunteer again and the experience has me very excited to attend more conferences in the future.